Jonathan Trevor Yahoo Pipes

Jonathan Trevor jtrevor@yahoo-inc.com

Apt near Park How do you ﬁnd an apartment near a park?

Apt near Park • Craigslist apartment listings • For each apartment: • Click on map link • Check distance to a park on the map • Tedious

Apt near Park • Data is available • Craigslist apartment RSS feed • Yahoo! Local API to ﬁnd Parks • Can do it in about 50 lines of Perl code #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use LWP::Simple; use XML::Simple; ...

Apt near Park • Basically combine feeds + web services • Yet another custom mashup • HousingMaps, ChicagoCrime, ... • Would be nice if there was an easier way...

Pipes grep -iv yahoo.com squid.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n > top_sources.txt • Unix Pipes for the Web • Build useful applications from simple primitives

Pipes • A free service that lets you remix and create data mashups using a visual editor • No need to host, we do it for you Craigslist Yahoo! Local

Demo Apartment near Something

Piecing things together in the cloud

Any Input Craigslist Yahoo! Google Ebay Your data here!

Any Output

Any Output RSS Readers Badges HTML Your app here!

Any Process Yahoo! Local Fetch Your Web Service Here! Sort

Openness Craigslist RSS Readers Yahoo! Fetch Yahoo! Local Badges Google Your Web Service Here! HTML Ebay Sort Your app Your data here! here!

Examples

Hot Deals Search • searches across many different deal hunting sites on the internet looking for the best prices.You can search for particular items or just let the pipe ﬁnd the best of what's available

Fantasy Sports search • get the edge on your friends with a single RSS feed based on searching 70 sites for fantasy sports blog articles

Geoannotated Reuters News • takes an RSS feed from the Reuters news service, and \"geocodes\" each item - making it possible to show where that news item is happening on a map of the world.

Who’s Viewed My LinkedIn Proﬁle

Kiva Loans by Location • gets a list of the micro-loans people have been making through the Kiva site, and shows the amazing variety of people and places that these loan are helping out.

Yahoo! Buzz Image Search

Craigslist house lookup with static Yahoo map

Yahoo Finance Stock Quote Watch List Feed

Contact's Favorite's

Yahoo Unanswered Questions • ﬁnds those questions in the Y! answers site that don't currently have an answer - so you can show how smart you are and answer those tricky questions.

Babbler by Max Case • Translates IM messages in Second Life

LastTube • uses content from Last.fm and YouTube.You can watch Youtube’s content based on your Recently Listened Tracks scrobbled to Last.fm.

Advantages to developers (why use an online service to do this?) • Leveraging large infrastructure • Faster access to network resources • Faster access to network services • System-wide knowledge • Leverage inter-organizational agreements • Easy to “string” together with other services • Easy to use (REST-style URLs)

Network services • On Y! network services (fast) • Geocoding, Local, Search ... • Shortcuts, Term Extraction, Translation • developer.yahoo.com • Off Y! • Google, AWS, Dapper etc

Run / Get the data • Each Pipe gets its own “hosted” page • Use the REST-style URLs to get the data

Edit REST-style queries http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run? _id=1mrlkB232xGjJDdwXqIxGw &_render=json &location=palo+alto%2C+ca &mindist=2 &what=parks &_callback=foofunction The ID of the Pipe

Edit REST-style queries http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run? _id=1mrlkB232xGjJDdwXqIxGw &_render=json &location=palo+alto%2C+ca &mindist=2 &what=parks &_callback=foofunction The format of the output (rss, json, kml, ical, csv)

Edit REST-style queries http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run? _id=1mrlkB232xGjJDdwXqIxGw &_render=json &location=palo+alto%2C+ca &mindist=2 &what=parks &_callback=foofunction The per Pipe user customizable parameters

Edit REST-style queries http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run? _id=1mrlkB232xGjJDdwXqIxGw &_render=json &location=palo+alto%2C+ca &mindist=2 &what=parks &_callback=foofunction Optional JSON callback function

Disadvantages (Why not to use an online service?) • Away from data • personal (desktop) • organizational (intranet) • Security and trust

Design and Implementation

Target Users • The top 10% of the web 2.0 pyramid • Coders, re-mixers, bloggers • Assume prior knowledge • Concepts... loops, data types • End-users beneﬁt indirectly

Architecture Your client Your application Browser Editor Web Site/API Engine Database Sources

Editor • Edits Pipe deﬁnitions • Heavy lifting performed by Engine • Rivals a desktop experience • Almost everything is now possible in a browser

Editor Design • Instant “ON”, no plugins • “download this” gets in the way • Data ﬂow applications are well suited to visual programming • Learn and propagate by “View Source” and “Clone”

Engine • Executes Pipes • Pipes are deﬁned by a simple deﬁnition format • Parallelizes as much of the execution as possible • Not limited to RSS, supports many common web addressable formats • but...

Web addressable data • is very malformed • can be slow • needs considerate access • can be untrustworthy • can be inaccessible from “here” (behind ﬁrewall etc)

Data in the Engine • is “cleaned” (and repaired) into UTF-8 • is cached for • performance • playing well with others • several HTTP proxy layers • serve stale and force caching • is “sanitized”

A year in the wild (20+ releases, 250k+ Pipes later)

What’s popular

Typical Pipes/mashups • Four types of mashup • Feed aggregation with ﬁltering • Two-source mashups • Data transformation and geocoding • Complex mashups using REST APIs • Geocoding remains a “mashup” favorite

Reasons for adoption • Lower barrier to use • Graphical editor made it quick to write Pipes, attracted non-developers • “View Source” for learning/tweaking • Wide array of data input formats and data output formats enabled Pipes to become a useful “component” in a larger ecology • Web 2.0 responsiveness to community

Inaccessible data • Lots of requests for more rich and personal data • Text documents, word documents, mail, Excel spreadsheets • Workarounds (to some) emerged • Online spreadsheets, calendars (gcal) with private RSS feeds and so on

Power... • We started by only supporting RSS • high-level building blocks and operations • good for common tasks and novice users • We listened to our user’s desires

...vs Complexity • Added sources for parsing JSON, XML, CSV, ICAL ... • Added modules that could do more and be combined in many ways • At the cost of simplicity • Harder to explain, use, compose • Stretching the capabilities of a visual development environment

Unexpected breadth • Experts who want to exploit the service • Non-programers with much simpler needs • In Pipes • Its easy to make useful data in the cloud • Its not easy enough to use it after • Users like things in one place

Making it easy to use • Many Pipes provide data that’s useful while mobile • Geosensitive information • Time sensitive decisions • Letting the cloud do the work allows rich thin clients (in addition to thick heavy ones) • enable novice...expert developers to create (simple) mobile applications that give the right information at the right time

Doing the mobile mash

Making it easy to use Com ing (ver • Badges are frequently requested y) soo n! • Despite other solutions • Initially three variants visualizing common types of data in Pipes • Geo - map badge • Flickr/Images - image badge • Aggregators, transformers - list badge

Badges

Conclusion 1/2 • Provides powerful data functions to any client • Consumes data from many services • Common data formats means any part of the cloud can become the input • Dapper, AWS, Google spreadsheets • ...or take the output • 1/3 Google mashups are powered by Pipes

Conclusion 2/2 • (Some) outstanding technical issues • Common authentication API • Inter-service common rate limiting scheme • Bridges to local data / dbs

Q&A

Jonathan Trevor Yahoo Pipes

0 comments

Notes on slide 1

2 Favorites